Educational Science

After Decades of Hunting, Physicists Claim They've Made Quantum Material from Depths of Jupiter

A team of French researchers has posted a paper online in which they claim to have achieved the holy grail of extreme-pressure materials science: creating metallic hydrogen in a laboratory. Physicists have suspected since the 1930s that under extreme pressures, hydrogen atoms — the lightest atoms on the periodic table,...

Objective Reality Doesn't Exist, Quantum Experiment Shows

Alternative facts are spreading like a virus across society. Now, it seems they have even infected science — at least the quantum realm. This may seem counter intuitive. The scientific method is after all founded on the reliable notions of observation, measurement and repeatability. A fact, as established by a...

Scientists just captured the first-ever photo of the phenomenon dubbed spooky action at a distance by Albert Einstein. That phenomenon, called quantum entanglement, describes a situation where particles can remain connected such that the physical properties of one will affect the other, no matter the distance (even miles) between them....

What is cryptography?

Since ancient times, people have relied on cryptography, the art of writing and solving coded messages, to keep their secrets secure. In the fifth century, enciphered messages were inscribed on leather or paper and delivered by a human messenger. Today, ciphers help protect our digital data as it zips through...

Physicists Use Bubbling Quantum Vacuum to Hopscotch Heat Across Empty Space

When you touch a hot surface, you're feeling movement. If you press your hand against a mug of tea, warmth spreads through your fingers. That's the sensation of billions of atoms banging together. Tiny vibrations carry thermal energy from the water to the mug and then into your skin as...

Forget Moore's Law — Quantum Computers Are Improving According to a Spooky 'Doubly Exponential Rate'

The era of quantum supremacy is nigh. Quantum computers, which make calculations with entangled particles, or qubits, are poised to overtake their conventional counterparts very, very fast. And it's all captured by a new law of computing, known as Neven's Law, according to a fascinating new article in Quanta Magazine....

Google's Quantum Computer Just Aced an 'Impossible' Test

Google just took a quantum leap in computer science. Using the company's state-of-the-art quantum computer, called Sycamore, Google has claimed quantum supremacy over the most powerful supercomputers in the world by solving a problem considered virtually impossible for normal machines. The quantum computer completed the complex computation in 200 seconds....

Quantum Supremacy Is Unlikely, Scientist Says

Google announced this fall to much fanfare that it had demonstrated quantum supremacy — that is, it performed a specific quantum computation far faster than the best classical computers could achieve. IBM promptly critiqued the claim, saying that its own classical supercomputer could perform the computation at nearly the same...

Do We Live in a Quantum World?

Let's face it: quantum mechanics is really confusing. All the rules of physics that we're used to simply go straight out the window in the quantum realm. Put a particle in a box. According to classical physics (and common sense), that particle should stay in that box forever. But under...